


The Past Is Another Country

by osprey_archer



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Loneliness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-03 03:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13332735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: He remembers. It’s just seems like the emotion has bleached out of his memories. Bucky’s back, and Steve is more alone than ever.Steve is having trouble adjusting to the new Bucky.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Salvia_G](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salvia_G/gifts).



He’s very lucky to have Bucky back.

Steve reminds himself of that, yet again. He is sitting at his desk, in his apartment in Stark Tower, watching the rain spatter against the windows, and the red glow of brake lights down below.

He is lucky to have Bucky back. He spent three months searching for him, three months worrying, and it could have gone on so much longer. Bucky might have been killed soon after the helicarriers fell. Might have been recaptured by Hydra. Might have gone back to Hydra _willingly_ , although that seemed unlikely, given that Hydra only ever sent Bucky on that one mission. 

Steve had asked Natasha for help searching the datadump, because he had thought there must be others. But it seemed to be true. Alexander Pierce got the Winter Soldier (complete with cryotank) through some shady deal with an ex-Soviet official in the early nineties, and then just kept him on ice until Project Insight. 

“It’s like they were saving him to throw at me,” Steve had told Natasha. 

He had hoped she would contradict him, but she hadn’t. “They knew a supersoldier could survive being frozen. They must have hoped you’d be found alive.” She was silent for a moment, and then added, “Probably they were hoping they’d find you before SHIELD did.”

“Matched set,” Steve had blurted. “Like action figures.” 

Maybe that’s what would have happened to him if his STRIKE team had succeeded in capturing him in that elevator. (All those friendly sparring sessions with Rumlow, with the whole STRIKE team. Nothing but a chance to gauge Steve’s weaknesses.) A quick trip through the memory-erasing chair, and a compliant Captain America… 

JARVIS’s voice interrupts Steve’s ruminations. “Would you like me to turn on the lights, sir?” he asks, and Steve realizes that dusk has fallen and the only light in the room comes from the city lights outside.

Steve used to do his homework crouched by a window, the light from the single streetlamp outside just barely bright enough to let him read his page. He swallows. 

“Maybe the desk lamp,” Steve tells JARVIS.

The desk lamp switches on. The warm pool of light draws Steve like a moth. He scoots in his chair and, almost automatically, opens the bottom left drawer.

That is the drawer where he keeps Bucky’s files. He has not looked at them again since Bucky showed up three months ago – just walked up to Steve, right there in New York City, when Steve had been scouring the globe trying to find him. Just materialized out of the trees in Central Park, a bright sunny day, walked right up to Steve in a blue jean jacket that didn’t quite hide the fact that there was something wrong with his left arm. 

“Good morning,” said Bucky, tense and stilted and polite, as if things were normal.

“Morning,” echoed Steve, and then they just stared at each other, because nothing was normal.

“It’s broken,” Bucky said, jerking his head toward his metal arm. “Can Tony Stark fix it?”

Bucky came back to Stark Tower with Steve, and he’s stayed. It’s been three months and they are exactly as awkward as they were on that first day. Polite acquaintances who happen to be sharing a floor in Tony’s tower. 

Steve flips open the thin manila folder where he stored the printouts of Bucky’s Hydra files. It falls open to a page he read over and over when Bucky was still missing. A transcript from the asset’s “maintenance session.” 

_The man on the bridge. Who was he?_

_I knew him._

Steve closes his eyes and slaps the folder shut again. 

Bucky does know Steve: he does remember. That’s lucky too, Steve reminds himself. Bucky doesn’t talk about it much, which is fine. Steve has trouble talking about his own memories before the ice. It hurts too much that it’s all gone. 

But when Bucky does talk about it – his voice is so flat. He recounts memories of their past as if he were saying _Des Moines is the capitol of Iowa_ : like it’s something he memorized. Steve used to worry that this is exactly what happened, that Bucky cribbed all this out of his mother’s memoir _A Hero Grows in Brooklyn_. (A big bestseller in the fifties. Steve tried to read it, not long after he defrosted, and got through the first page or so before he dropped it and spent an hour staring at the ceiling.) 

But Bucky uses exactly the same tone to talk about things that he could never have found in a book. That long hot summer when they shared a room at the YMCA. He never would have told his mother about that.

He remembers. It’s just seems like the emotion has bleached out of his memories. Bucky’s back, and Steve is more alone than ever.

“And drowning myself in self-pity, too,” Steve says, aloud, his voice wry. And it was such a stupid incident to set all this off: just a little exchange that afternoon, which had been a nice afternoon until then. They had gone to Central Park, as they often did – like the Barnes family often did, when Bucky and Steve were kids. Bought a bag of popcorn (which Bucky’s dad often did, impressing Steve greatly – a whole nickel spent like it was nothing), walked around the pond, watched some kites flying. 

It had just been – nice. And it made Steve feel affectionate, and homesick, and impulsive, and he said, “I missed you, Buck.” 

And Bucky replied, lightly, eyes on the kites: “Wish I could say the same.”

Steve felt like all the air had been punched out of him. Bucky glanced over, and away, and said, still lightly, “It’s an amnesia joke. Get it?”

A very small thing. But even now, hours later, Steve’s chest still feels sore. 

He pushes the Hydra file aside. That leaves two files on the desk. These are thicker. The first, foxed by age, is Bucky’s SSR file, which SHIELD gave Steve after he came off the ice. It came in a bundle with the other Howling Commandos’ files. 

Steve still has those too, locked away in a different drawer, but he can’t bear to look at them. All those _DECEASED_ stamps. SHIELD could have found a kinder way to tell him. 

Steve is aghast, looking back, that he ever joined SHIELD. Even without knowing about Hydra – he had plenty of evidence that SHIELD was rotten. That stack of folders. The fake forties hospital room. The tesseract experiments. He had crashed that plane so no one would find the tesseract and use it (of course the Allies would use it). He might as well have tried to land it safely, gone home to Peggy, gotten married and gone to yearly Howling Commandos reunions. 

Instead he crashed the plane and froze, and lost all the time he should have spent with them. Woke up and found himself so alone that he joined SHIELD just to be a part of something, and tried to replace the Howling Commandos with a bunch of guys who turned out to be Hydra moles. What a sick fucking joke. Rumlow’s probably still laughing, wherever the fuck he is. 

Steve pushes that file away too. There’s just one left: the old Soviet file that Natasha retrieved not long after Project Insight fell out of the sky. There used to be a photograph of Bucky Barnes in American GI uniform clipped to the beginning of the file, but soon after Natasha gave the file to him, Steve took the photo out and put it in a frame on his desk. There’s still an indentation from the paperclip if you look closely. 

Steve began a feverish crash-course in Russian as soon as he knew that Bucky spent most of his captivity in the Soviet Union. He’s still not very good, but he has read this file so many times that he can stumble along in the Cyrillic. He rereads it slowly. 

After Bucky’s fall, the Red Army found him in the snow, already missing an arm. His interrogators found him “uncooperative.” (Steve remembers Bucky repeating his name, rank, and serial number in that dark hall in the Hydra base. He wonders if the Red Army had an interrogator who spoke English.) 

They sent Bucky to a gulag. He tried to escape, and got shot by the guards. Made it far enough that they didn’t bother to collect the corpse, just left it there in the snow until spring. 

They might not have bothered collecting it then, either, except that when the snow melted and the temperatures rose above freezing – the supposed corpse staggered to its feet. 

The guards caught him. They sent him to Leningrad, to a laboratory, and that was when they made him into the Winter Soldier. Wiped his memories. Attached a new arm. 

There’s another photograph of him, after. Steve has not looked at this file in months, and the photo hits him with almost the same force that it did the first time he saw him. Bucky in Soviet uniform, grinning. A twin to the Bucky in GI uniform in that earlier photograph. 

He had already been through so much and he was still smiling. Steve wonders when that changed, and what changed it. 

Somehow Steve had imagined that Bucky did all his Winter Soldier work in the uniform he wore when he fought Steve. But that uniform – it’s not even a uniform, really, it’s a costume. Flashy, eye-catching. A dark mirror of that bright Captain America suit Coulson designed, the one Steve wore in the Battle of New York. Both costumes meant for photo ops. 

The Soviets didn’t want their Winter Soldier caught on camera. And what better way to prevent that than by putting him in a real soldier’s uniform? Just one man among the millions in the army. He could disappear in plain sight. A ghost: that’s what Natasha had called him. 

Sometimes the only record of his missions lies in this file. A location, a date, a name. A few scribbled notes in the margins. Steve has trouble parsing the sloppy handwritten Cyrillic and has only figured out a few. _He likes piroshki_ , one says. Another: _ice cream_. 

Steve ordered piroshki for dinner, not long after Bucky returned. Bucky wolfed them down, until Steve said, awkward, “I just wanted you to know – it’s okay if you want to talk about the Soviet Union, or anything – ” 

Bucky stopped chewing, mid-bite. Then he snatched up the bag and left. Steve ate leftover pad thai for dinner. 

There are not very many missions in the file. Steve once added up the time that Bucky spent off the ice, and realized that Bucky spent so much time frozen that he’s now younger than Steve. Just a little. 

It seems wasteful to pour so much time and effort into making a Winter Soldier – building the arm, the cryotank, the memory chair – and make so little use of him. Steve mentioned that to Natasha once, too, and she got that funny smile that Steve thinks is her version of crying. “The Red Room was never cost effective either,” she said. “No one ever accused the Soviet Union of efficiency.”

It was just a little joke to her, something to lighten the mood. But it gnaws at Steve. They _did_ think the Soviet Union would be efficient, back in the day. He and Bucky had never been uncritical admirers of the USSR itself: they were socialists, not communists, they did not agree with calls to violent revolution, they professed themselves unsurprised when the Revolution began to eat its own in 1937. That was the way of revolutions. Just look at the French Revolution and its Terror. 

But they had believed in the planned economy: the path of the future. Experts running everything, all industries nationalized, society running at the very peak of efficiency. Shades of Edward Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_ , one of Steve’s favorite books as a kid. 

The hero in _Looking Backward_ fell into a coma in 1887 and awoke in 2000 to a dazzling socialist paradise. Steve woke up to find capitalism the smug and unchallenged victor in the battle of economic systems. He is more than a little bitter. 

Everyone at SHIELD seemed to find this a little embarrassing – as if Steve had taken it upon himself to stalwartly defend the position that the earth was flat. Sad, outdated, out of touch, impervious to the evidence, poor guy. 

Steve never could abide pity. 

He wonders how Bucky feels about it – socialism, and the Soviet Union. He has tried to ask, but Bucky won’t talk about that more than anything else, anything that might be more important than what he’d like for dinner. Draws back in his shell like a hermit crab when someone prods it. 

He needs to stop prodding Bucky. 

The clarity of that thought seems to snap Steve back into focus. He has been too direct, too eager, like a puppy, trying to force Bucky to pay attention to him and pat his head, metaphorically speaking – when Bucky is only six months off the ice. 

Six months off the ice, Steve was so fucked in the head that he joined SHIELD. Bucky is really doing fine. 

Before they found Bucky, Steve had tried to prepare for every possibility. He read about PTSD, POWs, cult deprogramming; he listened and nodded earnestly when Sam said, “You know he’s not going to be the same, Steve.” Steve had believed that he believed it. 

But in the end, he really didn’t. He knows that now. He had thought Bucky was going to swoop in and save him, just like he always did. 

It works better when Steve doesn’t push. 

Maybe he’ll order pirozhki again. Without commentary this time. Just let Bucky eat.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve nearly chickens out on the pirozhki. Steve knows from experience the intensity of the memories that food can trigger: not long after he defrosted, he fled a Jewish deli because the matzoh ball soup tasted exactly the same as the soup Mrs. Barnes used to make and damned if he was going to start crying in a restaurant. 

And that was a happy memory. “What if the pirozhki remind him of the gulag?” he asks Natasha. 

It’s the first time he’s seen her in months. She must have been creating new covers, like she said she would, because Steve wouldn't have recognized her if JARVIS hadn’t announced her when she walked in: her hair is bleached almost white, her lips and fingernails painted black, and her nose ring features a skull with glittering ruby-red eyes. (“Clip-on,” she explains, when she sees Steve staring – he’s still not used to body piercings – and takes off the nose ring and slides it in the pocket of her long black coat.)

“They wouldn’t have been feeding them pirozhki in the gulag,” Natasha says. 

“Oh.” Steve knows nothing about the gulag, he realizes – nothing about Soviet history in general. He has been so busy trying to catch up on American history and pop culture that he has neglected the rest of the world.

“I think it’s great that you’re doing this,” Natasha says. Her voice is abrupt. “Not many people would realize that he might miss Russia.” 

“Oh…” Steve is appalled. It has never crossed his mind that Bucky might miss Russia: that’s not why he’s getting pirozhki. He wanted to – what? Give Bucky an opportunity to talk about how bad Russia was? 

Startle a reaction out of him? 

Steve wants to smack himself. He would call the whole thing off right then, except Natasha says, “When I joined SHIELD, no one ever thought I might miss Russia either.”

A little explosion goes off in Steve’s chest. It’s partly shame: he never considered that either. 

But it’s understanding, too. He gets it. Everyone at SHIELD had seemed to think that the past was a hellhole and why would Steve miss it now that he was in the shiny bright future? Steve learned the hard way that when people ask, “Do you miss the past?”, it was really code for “Are you secretly racist?” 

When really what he misses are the small, personal things. Walking across Brooklyn with Bucky, late, talking about everything and nothing: two young men who thought they knew about the school of hard knocks and didn’t know a damn thing. Mrs. Barnes making cocoa at the stove. Dancing with Peggy in her red dress, knowing the steps and the song, not lost at sea in seventy years of musical history that he’s missed. 

“That’s hell,” Steve says. “Missing something when no one can understand why.” 

She slides him a half-smile. “For three years after I joined SHIELD, I didn’t have a single pirozhok. Not a blin, not a bowl of borscht. I never rewatched _Cheburashka_ or _Snezhnaya Koroleva_ , or…” She waves a hand. She is wearing heavy silver rings. “I figured SHIELD would interpret any interest in anything Russian as a sign that I was a double agent. Oh, she’s going to a pirozhki place: must be a Red Room front. Better raid it.” 

Steve no longer has any illusions about SHIELD. “You were probably right.”

“I’m always right,” says Natasha. Her voice is light again. She flips her bleached hair behind her shoulder. She wants to move on, probably sees Steve feeling sorry for her and despises him for it. 

But still. At least no one at SHIELD ever thought Steve’s quest for the perfect matzoh ball soup was a sign that he was a traitor. 

Steve wonders if Bucky worries about that. If he thought that first round of pirozhki was a test of his loyalty.

Steve is suddenly decisive. “Let’s get pirozhki tonight,” he says. “Pirozhki and – ” Good Lord, he can’t think of any other Russian foods. He really _has_ to read more about the Soviet Union. “A whole Russian feast,” he finishes. “And watch a Russian movie, anything you like. And if Bucky wants to join in, he can, and if he doesn’t – ”

“There’s no pressure.” Natasha nods. “That’s great.” She considers. “How about _Bronenosets_ – no, wait – _Battleship Potemkin_?” 

Steve’s throat turns sour. “No.” Then he’s embarrassed: he did say _anything you like_ \- and tries to explain: “I’ve seen that. My art school friends and I liked to go to the People’s Theater…”

It’s agonizing to watch movies that he saw before he froze. It reminds him, every time, of the first time he saw it. The grand movie palaces with their chandeliers and frescos, the moments when the whole theater erupted in laughter (and the theaters were always packed, in those pre-television days), the friends he had gone to see movies with. Steve saw _Battleship Potemkin_ with Thomas Dudley Harriman, who was always good for an argument and always took an orthodox Marxist position – except about art; even for Marx he wouldn’t compromise his standards on art. 

And now the movie palaces have been razed and the new theaters are half-empty and the friends are all dead, except Bucky. And Bucky watches movies in silence now, expressionless. In the old days he guffawed at the funny scenes, leaned forward like he’d like to get a punch in himself during the fights. 

When they were nine, Bucky cried during the death scene in _Wings_ , and socked Steve when Steve teased him about it after. “You cried too!” Bucky accused, and Steve yelled, “Did _not_!” – furious because it was true. “You started it!” Steve shouted. “I wouldn’t have cried at all if you hadn’t!” 

Steve can’t even begin to think how to explain. But Natasha must understand something, because she says easily, “ _Snezhnaya Koroleva_ , then. _Snow Queen_ , unless they changed the title in English. You don’t mind watching a kid’s movie, do you?”

“No,” Steve says, and hopes it is animated, although he cannot bring himself to ask. 

“I _loved_ this movie when I was a kid,” Natasha says. 

Steve is puzzled. “Before the Red Room?” 

She rolls her eyes at him. “Sometimes the Red Room took a break from the constant torment to show us movies.” 

She says it with such a straight face that Steve is not sure she’s joking until she smiles. “A good spy has to know about pop culture. It’s part of fitting in.”

Well, Steve knows all about that. 

“The Red Room did a terrible job keeping up with American culture,” Natasha muses. “I nearly blew my cover during first mission because I didn’t know about the Muppets.” 

Steve is overcome with gloom. Two and a half years in the twenty-first century, and he hasn’t even heard of – “The Muppets?” 

Natasha lights up. “I’ll show you. We’ll get a Muppet movie too,” she says, with the irritating relish she always gets when she can rub his dinosaur status in his face – and then Steve gets it: she’s delighted to be the one in the know for once. 

They get _The Snow Queen_ , and _Muppets Most Wanted_ for good measure. Steve, after some hesitation – he didn’t expect the library to have quite so _many_ books about the Soviet Union – checks out all three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s _The Gulag Archipelago_. Might as well make up for lost time. 

They order a whole Russian feast to go with it. Pirozhki, pelmeni, borscht, stuffed cabbage leaves called golubtsi, an enormous loaf of bread, and sweet vatrushki for dessert. 

When they get back to the apartment, Steve calls, “Dinner!” But there is no answer.

Natasha is already kneeling on the floor next to the DVD player. “JARVIS, can you tell Bucky we’re here?” 

“Yes, Agent Romanov.”

The DVD hasn’t even finished loading before Steve is checking over his shoulder to see if Bucky has shown up. He glances back and glances back, until Natasha says, “ _Steve_.”

“You’re sitting on the floor,” Steve protests. “How can you even see – ?”

“I can hear you moving.”

Steve loads up his plate and tries to focus on the movie. The animation is good. It reminds him of Disney, which he finds obscurely disappointing. And it seems unlikely, really, that the Winter Soldier would have seen a kid’s movie, although who knows… 

Steve is worrying again. “I’m getting a glass of water,” he tells Natasha, and stands up – and finds that Bucky is leaning against the doorway, as if he has been standing there to watch. 

They both freeze. Steve has the impression that Bucky wants to bolt, but he stands there, unmoving, arms folded, eyes on Natasha. She is still sitting on the floor, twisted around to look up at Bucky. 

They haven’t met before, Steve realizes. Not formally. Outside of trying to kill each other. 

“Hey, Bucky,” Steve says. “This is Natasha Romanov. Natasha, this is… Bucky. Bucky Barnes.” 

Natasha lifts a hand. “Hey.”

Bucky is peering into her face. Most of the black lipstick is gone now, wiped away by the food. “I shot you,” Bucky says, and then adds, thoughtfully, “Twice.” 

“I shot you with a rocket launcher, though,” says Natasha.

To Steve’s immense surprise, Bucky smiles. He doesn’t smile very much these days. But then, even with the bleached hair and the thick black eyeliner, Natasha is a very pretty girl. “Sorry,” he says – almost whispers – and looks down. Sheepish. _Flirting_. 

“Come watch _The Snow Queen_ with us,” Natasha says, and Bucky shuffles into the room. Steve tries not to feel jealous. It’s good that someone can make Bucky smile. 

And Bucky does sit on the couch by Steve rather than on the floor by Natasha, so there’s that. He loads up his plate and begins to munch. 

Natasha restarts the movie. Steve’s still having trouble paying attention, though. He keeps sneaking glances at Bucky, sitting there on his left. Bucky’s face has resumed its usual expressionless look. Steve tells himself to stop looking, and looks anyway.

The movie is nearly over – the heroine has reached the Snow Queen’s cave – when Steve glances over and finds Bucky looking at him. Steve is about to look away, but Bucky suddenly leans over and gives his shoulder a friendly little shove. “Still interested in animation?” he asks Steve.

Steve lights up. “Yeah!”

Bucky pulls back. Natasha is looking over her shoulder at them. She leans back to snag a vatrushka off the table. “You like animation?”

Suddenly Steve is embarrassed. He once indicated a vague interest in seeing _Cinderella_ and Rumlow called him Princess for a month. “Yeah.”

“He used to draw all the time,” Bucky chimes in. 

It’s not an accusation, but Steve still feels defensive. “I’ve been busy,” Steve snaps, and looks away, because it’s not true. He is less busy than he has ever been. He has nothing to do but train and go on the occasional mission. There’s not even any housework: JARVIS takes care of everything. 

“There are so many other movies we could have gotten,” Natasha complains. Steve thinks she is changing the subject, and is grateful. “ _Snegurochka_. Or _Dikiye lebedi_.”

“We can still get them,” Steve says. “If you want. Do you want to watch them, Buck?” 

Bucky has slouched down among the cushions. He looks deflated. “I’m tired,” he says.

“I didn’t mean tonight,” Steve says. 

“Let’s just finish this movie,” Bucky mutters.

He leaves as soon as the credits roll. Steve and Natasha look at each other. “So,” says Steve. “That’s Bucky.”

Natasha nods. A smile tugs at her mouth. “The pirozhki didn’t make him run screaming.” 

Steve frowns.

“He seems all right,” Natasha offers. 

Steve sighs. “He’s changed,” he says. 

“And you haven’t?” 

“No, I have,” Steve says. He feels wrong-footed. “We all have. You’ve changed, too.” 

Natasha backs off. “Let’s watch _Muppets Most Wanted_ ,” she says. 

Steve is tired, and doesn’t particularly want to. But only an idiot complains about loneliness and then turns down companionship.

“I have to leave tomorrow,” Natasha says. “I’ve got another mission.” 

“Oh,” says Steve, and hopes he sounds okay. He’s stupidly disappointed. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s watch it.” 

He doesn’t really get the movie, though. Maybe it takes a prior knowledge of the Muppets to understand why the Russian woman prison guard would fall in love with Kermit the frog. 

It is very late by the time the movie ends. Natasha turns off the movie. They sit and look at the dark screen. 

“I don’t think Bucky would have liked that,” Natasha says. 

In the dim light, her bleached hair looks gray. Her face looks pale, bone-white. 

“I guess a Russian prison camp isn’t very funny,” Steve says. 

“No,” says Natasha. “Not very.” 

***

Watery soup and gluey black bread. 

That is what the inmates of the gulags ate. Tired as he is, Steve can’t sleep, so he starts reading _The Gulag Archipelago_ , and that makes sleep impossible. 

Garden-variety criminals often got themselves jobs weighing the bread in the camps, and shorted the political prisoners, who starved to death, if they didn’t freeze to death. Or die of dysentery or cholera or any of the other hundred diseases that carry people off in crowded and filthy conditions. 

It reminds Steve of Andersonville, the Confederate prison where so many Union prisoners of war died. Andersonville writ large, stretched across a nation, Andersonville as a policy rather than an exigency of war. 

The Soviet Union sent prisoners of war to the gulag. Not just the soldiers they captured. Their own captured soldiers, who had been imprisoned in Nazi camps, were sent to the gulag upon their return to the Soviet Union. 

Solzhenitsyn is sardonic. “When our soldiers were sentenced to only ten years for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner (action injurious to Soviet military might), this was humanitarian to the point of being illegal. According to the Stalinist code, they all should have been shot on their return home.” 

Steve slams the book shut. His hands are shaking. No wonder they sent Bucky to a gulag, even though he was a soldier from an Allied nation.

Bucky, a prisoner of war in a society that took that view of prisoners. Not that Bucky had known, after they wiped his memories. But what does he think of it now? 

Does he think he should have shot himself in the snow below the train tracks when the fall didn’t kill him? Death before dishonor. 

Steve goes up to the roof of Stark Tower to stand in the cold wind. It is spitting rain. Soon he is shivering with cold. 

He wishes he had researched the gulag before springing those pirozhki on Bucky. Had read anything about the Soviet Union at all. 

The STRIKE team used to bring old movies along on missions to watch with Steve. They meant to give him a treat, sacrificing their movie time to watch “that black and white shit where no one knows how to throw a punch” (as Steve had overheard Rollins complaining once: superhearing has a lot of downsides), and Steve tried to appreciate it, but when they watched something Steve had seen back in the day – it was agonizing. 

Steve never said anything. Who couldn’t handle a fucking movie? Steve can see it: Rumlow rolling his eyes, asking, “Did I trigger you, Cap?” When Rumlow used it, _trigger_ meant something like _upset_ or _offend_ , and Rumlow used all three words with that same little _Don’t be a pussy_ sneer in his voice.

And maybe that hadn’t been an honest mistake, after all. Maybe the STRIKE team knew all along what they were doing to him with those movies and figured it’d soften him up… 

And at least the movies Rumlow picked tormented Steve with _good_ memories, movie palaces and crackerjack and long late night discussions with his art school friends about whether movies were _art_. (“Sure they are,” Steve insisted. “If the Impressionists were alive today, they’d be making movies. Look at Jean Renoir!”)

Good memories. Not fleas and rotten meat (the maggot scene in _Battleship Potemkin_! Thank God Steve hadn’t agreed to watch that) and whatever medical tortures they had inflicted on Bucky to attach that metal arm. 

He shouldn’t have listened to Natasha. It’s understandable that she might miss Russia, but her experience there was entirely different than Bucky’s, really not the same thing at all. He should have gone with his gut and not pestered Bucky with pirozhki after all. 

He takes _The Snow Queen_ and _Muppets Most Wanted_ back to the library, furtively, as if he were returning dirty films. He checks out more Soviet history books instead. 

***

Even Steve’s immune system is not equal to an hour brooding in the freezing rain without a coat. He comes down with a nasty cold, and spends most of the week wrapped up in blankets reading. 

It’s nostalgic, really. Steve has always loved history, and often spent hours reading about it while he was sick in bed. Bucky would drop by after school to bring him new books from the library. 

He drops by this week, too. Steve jams his book into the back of the couch when he hears Bucky coming, and they chat aimlessly about nothing. Sometimes Bucky brings him toast. 

The American Civil War and the French Revolution were his favorites: he loved the titanic struggle between good and evil in the one (the North and the South respectively; Steve had no truck with the South’s Lost Cause mythology), and the tragedy of good intentions gone wrong in the other. Heroes turned into villains. Napoleon rising to impose a greater tyranny on not only France but all of Europe. 

He expects the Russian Revolution to follow the same storyline. That is, after all, the storyline that he saw back in the thirties: the brave revolutionaries overthrowing tsarist tyranny, leading to a great flowering of freedom that was brutally suppressed by the even more tyrannical Stalin. 

But _The Gulag Archipelago_ destroys this view. The prisons were there from the start; the political repression of all the non-Bolshevik parties began under Lenin. Stalin simply expanded it. He systematically starved millions of Ukrainian peasants in the early 1930s, when the Soviet government sent in an army of commissars who accused the farmers of hoarding, took all their grain, and left them to starve. 

Steve feels nauseous. There had been rumors about the famines – capitalist slanders, they had thought; Steve had vociferously defended the Soviet Union in arguments right up until the show trials in 1937. And now it turns out that the rumors were right, just like the rumors about Nazi death camps.

Or the accusations that SHIELD was a fascist organization. Those turned out to be even more right than the accusers knew.

It is funny, Steve thinks – it is funny how every time you think you’ve reached the final stage of disillusionment, something comes along to disillusion you further. There are always more veils to strip away. 

He quits for the day. Even the next morning he can’t face more Solzhenitsyn, so he reads Robert Conquest’s _The Great Terror_. Someone has defaced the library book with vigorous underlining, which makes Steve frown. He was raised to revere libraries – both he and Bucky were. 

One sentence is so heavily highlighted that Steve has trouble making it out: “Not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of the situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa.”

He reads an enormous tome about Stalin and his politburo, and a thinner one about the Berlin Airlift. He is beginning to remember why he didn’t read more about the Soviet Union to prepare for Bucky’s return. All of this is interesting, but none of it seems relevant. 

He’s committed, though, he’s got his stack of books and nothing better to do. He moves on to a book about Khrushchev’s visit to America in the 1950s – but he can’t finish that one either. It’s too hard to read about America in the fifties. 

That should have been his future, his and Peggy’s. A nice house with shiny new appliances and central heating, vacations in rustic cabins by beautiful lakes where Steve would paint and Peggy would teach their children to swim. Steve imagines her in a red polka-dot bathing suit. She would not have wanted to give up her work to have children, but perhaps they could have hired a nanny… They would have made it work. Steve’s sure of it. 

He blows his nose and puts the book aside and picks up another, at random, anything to distract him.

This time he hits the jackpot. Anya von Bremzen’s _Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking_ includes a long section about her mother Larisa’s childhood in Stalinist Russia, a child’s eye view of the Soviet Union, and it’s here that Steve begins to see something of what Bucky’s experience might have been like. 

An amnesiac was not a child, of course: Bucky had retained his adult reasoning skills and his strength. But still, he had been adrift in a strange new world, trying to figure out it – and realizing swiftly (Bucky had always been swift on the uptake) that he would have to do so on the sly, entirely by observation, without asking questions. Questions were dangerous, and bad thoughts could get you killed. 

That’s a lesson Steve learned in Brooklyn, and Bucky too, he thinks – assuming that the summer when they fooled around in the hot little room they shared at the YMCA had not been an aberration for him, and he had not seen skinny little Steve (with longish hair, that year, as had been fashionable in art school) as a sort of replacement girl. 

Steve rests the book against his chest and gazes up at the ceiling. Sexuality is just one aspect of a personality, and yet there had been times when he felt suppressing it would suffocate him. (Maybe literally. It brought on asthma attacks.) Becoming a good Stalinist would require suppressing everything – everything. Everything except love of Stalin. Unhappiness was disloyalty. As Larisa’s mother fumes at her daughter: “How _dare_ you have such bad, silly thoughts!” 

No wonder Bucky doesn’t talk much. 

“You planning on making kissel?”

Bucky’s voice startles Steve so much that he nearly knocks the book off his chest. Bucky stands in the doorway, a mug in his hand, head cocked. 

“No,” Steve blurts. He flings an arm across the book as if to hide it, which is stupid: Bucky has already seen it. 

Bucky tilts his head further. He is reading the titles of the stack of books by the couch. Steve has gotten sloppy. He brought them out instead of leaving them in his room. 

Bucky’s jaw clenches. Steve feels he ought to say something, to explain – but before he can say anything, Bucky sets the mug down smartly on the table. “I made you tea.”

“Bucky – ”

Bucky leaves. His boots make no sound on the carpet. 

There is lemon and honey in the tea. Steve’s mom used to make it like that. Steve takes two sips – it’s really too hot to drink – Steve pushes away the blankets and goes in search of Bucky.

But he can’t find him. He checks all around their apartment, up on the roof, down in the gym – but he’s nowhere. 

Stark Tower has an elevator, of course, but Steve hauls himself back up the stairs to his apartment instead. His feet feel heavy. He could ask JARVIS where Bucky is, but no. If Bucky doesn’t want to be found, Steve should leave him be. 

Bucky may not even be upset (Steve tries to convince himself, unsuccessfully): Bucky is forever making abrupt exits these days – 

There are holes in _Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking_. 

Steve picks it up, disbelieving. It looks like someone took a drill to it, or used it for target practice – Steve sticks a finger through one of the holes. His fingertip wiggles out of the back cover. 

Or stabbed the book with metal fingers. 

Steve’s heartbeat roars in his ears. “Bucky!” he shouts, and spins round, heart pounding, checking his exits, his shield’s in his bedroom, shit. If Bucky’s lying in wait behind one of the apartment doors – 

“Bucky!” he yells again, and jumps about a mile when JARVIS answers him. 

“Sergeant Barnes is on the rooftop, Captain Rogers.”

“Thank you,” Steve spits. He grabs up his defaced book, lurches toward his room for his shield, and stops, wavering. Should he take it? 

He leaves it. He charges up the steps to the roof two at a time. His thoughts have gone cold and clear, like a swift mountain stream. There’s a garden on the roof, mostly dead now that it’s winter, but the greenhouse and the gazebo might provide cover – 

But Bucky’s not trying to hide. He’s leaning against the railing, looking out over the city, although he swings around as soon as Steve steps out on the roof. No visible weapons. He’s backed up against the railing. 

Steve hurls _Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking_ at him. 

The book twists in the air, flutters open, and falls short. Bucky looks down at it and up at Steve. His jaw clenches again. 

“That’s a library book!” Steve shouts. 

Bucky’s eyes widen. His flush deepens, his mouth opens. 

Steve strides toward him. He kicks the book when he reaches it. It skitters across the ground. Bucky kicks it back at him. The book flops open and lands on the gritty rooftop, pages down. 

It’s cold up here. Bucky has not attacked him, after all. Steve had half-expected Bucky to come after him in full face-twisting Winter Soldier rage. 

They face each other, ten feet apart. Steve is breathing hard. “Why?” he asks. 

Bucky shrugs. 

“ _Why?_ ” Steve insists, and when Bucky doesn’t speak, he throws up his hands. “Nazis destroy libraries!” 

Bucky explodes away from the railing, not toward Steve, but to the side. “ _I am not a Nazi_!” 

“You destroyed my book!” Steve yells. 

“You don’t need that book! If you want to know about the Soviet Union, you should ask someone who was _fucking there_.”

“I have asked!” Steve yells back. “You _won’t talk_.” 

Bucky’s fists clench. He takes a step toward Steve, stops himself, and then continues, more slowly, stalking like a panther. Steve holds his ground. His fists ache. His hindbrain screams, _punch first_. 

Bucky stops, a little too close. It’s an awkward range for punching, which doesn’t mean shit to a man with a metal arm, of course. Steve’s stomach feels soft and unprotected. 

“You don’t talk about anything either,” Bucky says. “You wanna talk about any of the shit that’s in your files, huh?”

It punches all the air out of Steve. He knew there were files about him, of course. He knew. 

He just never envisioned his friends reading them. 

Bucky advances, literally takes a step forward. They’re nearly toe to toe. “It’s all online, you know – everything your minders wrote about you,” he says. 

Steve’s heart is beating so hard that it’s hard to hear him. “So?” Steve says. 

Bucky’s angry breath is hot on Steve’s face. “Sharon Carter,” he says, slow, deliberate, “thought you oughta get a dog.” 

Steve shoves him. Bucky stumbles back a few steps, then plants his feet and stands. “How about Rumlow, Cap? You wanna talk about Rumlow?” 

“Fuck you!” Steve snarls. 

Rumlow always, always called him Cap. 

“Did he manage to – ” His hands rise, fingers making air quotes. “ – ‘swing a romantic involvement’?” 

That’s when Steve punches him. A right hook to the face. It surprises Bucky, knocks him back a step, and then he lunges forward as if to slam Steve to the ground. Steve’s not quite ready for it, barely manages to stay on his feet, and they’re grappling – 

And then they’re both soaked with icy water. They leap apart like a couple of tomcats sprayed with a hose. 

“Miss Potts installed fight disruption capacities in all sprinkler systems after Mr. Stark destroyed one of his residences in a fracas with Colonel Rhodes,” JARVIS informs them. He sounds disapproving. 

Steve is embarrassed and still furious and very, very cold. His teeth are beginning to chatter. “Bucky,” he says. 

But his only response is the slam of the door. Bucky has run for it. Again. 

“Bucky!” Steve shouts, and gives the poor battered copy of _Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking_ one last kick. It lands amid the dead brown stalks of the tomato plants. Steve leaves it there and goes inside the stairwell, where it’s warm – and then, despite everything, never mind the fact that the book is already ruined, comes back up into the cold and brings it inside, too.


	3. Chapter 3

Steve takes a long, long walk. 

He’s hoping to outwalk his fury, but for a long time he only gets angrier as he walks. To hell with Bucky anyway. Who the hell does he think he is? 

It doesn’t hurt so much about Sharon. She was only a cute neighbor, not someone he knew well, and she was on the right side in the end even if she did spy on him. It’s just a pinprick. Rumlow, though –

Bucky’s not that long out of the forties. He knows damn well that an imputation like that is just asking for a punch in the nose. 

There’s a raw guilt gnawing at the edges of Steve’s fury, like a mouse, whispering, _But you still shouldn’t have hit him_. That’s the twenty-first century talking, and Steve quashes it. Bucky was spoiling for a fight. He might as well have put a chip on his shoulder and dared Steve to knock it off. He hit Steve just where it hurt, bringing up Rumlow – 

Christ, Rumlow. 

Steve worked with the STRIKE team nearly every day. They went on missions together, had each other’s backs. Steve once held Rumlow’s leg together so he wouldn’t bleed out before the medic arrived. “You’re gonna owe me a steak,” he told Rumlow, and Rumlow laughed, his face white beneath the blood spatter. 

He paid up, too, once he was better. Took Steve out for dinner, one on one, and in retrospect it probably wasn’t an accident the way his foot kept knocking against Steve’s under the table. 

Steve would have gone for it, if Rumlow had just made it obvious that was what he was after. Steve was so lonely, he would’ve gone for anything. 

He had clutched like a drowning man at every bit of togetherness the STRIKE team offered. Late-night steakhouse dinners, Superbowl Sunday at Rumlow’s place. The Fourth of July barbecue that turned out to be a surprise birthday party. 

They’d already started planning a trip for the next Fourth of July. They wanted to take Steve to an amusement park; apparently they didn’t realize amusement parks had been invented in the forties. “You idiots never heard of Coney Island?” Steve laughed. 

“The roller coasters at Cedar Point will blow your fucking mind,” Rumlow replied, avoiding the question.

Steve discovers that he has walked to Brooklyn. His steps slow and stop: he rarely comes here. It’s so different from the Brooklyn he remembers. 

He turns back. His feet ache by the time he reaches Stark Tower. He climbs the stairs just to feel his thighs burn. 

He is cold and tired all through and he ought to go to bed, but he knows he’ll never sleep. He boots up his computer instead. 

The Rising Tide hacker collective put all the SHIELD data dump information into a nice easy-to-navigate database. It takes Steve a few false starts to find what he’s after (there are a _lot_ of memos about Captain America), but soon enough he’s hit the mother lode. Memos between Rumlow and Pierce, re: Steve Rogers. 

_He’s out of place here,_ Rumlow writes. It’s one of his early memos. _We can give him a home_. 

Steve rubs his hand over his mouth. He reads on. Rumlow is as meticulous in his observations of Steve as of any stronghold he meant to storm. Steve is “uncomfortable with movie sex scenes,” Rumlow notes. (Clearly he noticed Steve blushing through _Mr. and Mrs. Smith_. The Alfred Hitchcock version hadn’t been anything like _that_.) “Uncomfortable with nudity, revealing clothes. He doesn’t mind women in pants, though.” 

Steve’s lip curls. Rumlow didn’t do his homework. Why should Steve mind women in pants? Lots of women wore pants during the war. Peggy wore pants all the time.

Not for publicity photos, though: she was part of the Captain America propaganda machine, too. And that might be all that Rumlow knows about her. The public lipstick smile. 

Or maybe not. A few memos later when Rumlow writes that he thinks Steve was “completely pussywhipped by Peggy Carter.”

That’s a sucker punch. So that’s what Rumlow got out of Steve’s stumbling reminiscences about the girl he loved. 

“He likes apple pie,” Rumlow notes. “We tried to take him to a Thai place and his eyes got real big. Maybe he doesn’t like Orientals?”

That racist fuck. Steve didn’t want to go to the Thai place because trying a new cuisine on top of everything else that was new and strange about the twenty-first century had seemed completely overwhelming. He hopes Rumlow ate his words and choked on them after Steve got more acclimated to the future and became a big fan of sushi. 

There’s a light knock on his door. Steve jumps at the sound, and spins his chair to see – Bucky, standing tentatively in the doorway. 

“Bucky,” Steve blurts. He’s been so absorbed in Rumlow’s words that he’s almost surprised to see Bucky there. 

“Steve,” Bucky says. He sounds surprised too, like he expected a different reaction. 

Steve is flustered. “What do you want?” he asks. 

Bucky shifts his weight, so he’s standing upright rather than leaning. “I wanted to apologize,” he says. “About your books. And… everything.”

Steve nods. He wants to accept the apology, or at least a part of him does, but the words won’t come out. Bucky looks away. “I’ll pay for them,” Bucky says.

“All right,” Steve says. 

Steve expects Bucky to go, but he plants his feet and stays. He’s never been in here before, and he looks around the room, taking in the double bed, the bare walls, the mostly-empty shelves of the bookcase. The STRIKE team pretty much destroyed Steve’s apartment in DC after Steve went on the run, and he hasn’t replaced much of anything. 

Bucky’s gaze comes to rest on Steve’s laptop. Steve twists his chair around, as if to close the screen, even though there’s no point. Bucky clearly recognizes the database. 

“You reading those files?” Bucky asks. 

Steve clicks aimlessly at the screen a couple of times. “Yeah.” 

“Have you read them before?”

“No.”

Another long pause. Steve stares at his computer. He can’t concentrate to read. He just can’t bear to look at Bucky. 

“Why’d you do it?” Steve asks. “The books. They were _library_ books,” he says, again. 

“They didn’t look like library books.”

Steve swivels sharply, about to protest, but then falls back. Bucky is right, in a manner of speaking. Library books in the forties had those heavy library bindings, nothing like twenty-first century library books with their plastic covers. Steve had almost forgotten. 

It unsettles him. “Still,” Steve insists. 

“Oh, I don’t know.” Bucky scratches his nose. He clears his throat. “I know I’ve disappointed you since I came back,” he says, and takes a deep breath. It hitches partway through, and trembles, and all of a sudden all of Steve’s anger melts up like a cinder and he’s only tired and sad. 

It is only then that he really hears what Bucky said, and blurts, far too late, “No – ”

“No,” Bucky interrupts. “Don’t keep pretending everything is all right. You’re so fucking cheerful, it makes me want to punch you. How can you be so chipper?” 

Steve is aghast. “I’m not,” he says, and when he sees Bucky gathering himself to argue, he snaps, “I’m not, Bucky, it’s an act. Damn it.” 

Bucky sits heavily on the edge of Steve’s bed. “Why?” he asks. “Why act like that?”

“I wanted…” Steve has no good answer. “I got used to pretending everything was fine,” he says. “With STRIKE. And I guess I…” His voice peters out. 

“This isn’t what I – ” Bucky begins, and stops. His throat bobs as he swallows. “I just meant to apologize,” Bucky says. His voice has a muffled sound, almost choked. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.” 

“No,” Steve says. “No, that’s all right,” – and Bucky casts him a dour glance. Steve begins to feel a little panicky. What the hell is he supposed to say if “everything’s fine” isn’t the right answer? “I think I wanted,” Steve says, and he’s beginning to choke up, “everything to be all right again, and I thought if I just acted like it was – ”

He turns his chair sharply away from Bucky and fumbles for his box of Kleenex. He shreds two before he manages to get one out. He blows his nose. “I’ve got a cold,” he says.

“D’you want some tea?” 

Steve shakes his head. He wipes his face with his sleeve as surreptitiously as he can, although he’s sure Bucky sees. He can see his face in the dark window, and even that foggy reflection is red. “No,” he says, and adds, “Thank you”; and then adds, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” 

Steve shuffles his chair back around. He lifts his eyes to look at Bucky. “I’m sorry,” he says again. His voice is hoarse “I’ve… expected too much of you. Six months after I defrosted – I was a mess. I’m still a mess.” He laughs slightly, and looks away. “I thought you’d fix everything. Like you always did.” 

“I never fixed shit, Steve.” 

“You made me feel better.” 

“And now I don’t.” Bucky’s voice is quiet. He is bent forward, twisted up like Rodin’s _Thinker_ , if the Thinker had his face in his hand. 

“You used to make me feel good,” Steve says. He is fumbling to explain. “I expected you to make me feel good again, when so much shit has happened that – ” Steve’s gaze drops back to the carpet. “I was starting to feel comfortable in the twenty-first century. I had a place in the world, a job, and friends. And then SHIELD turned out to be riddled with Hydra and – ” He makes a sweeping motion with his hand. “All that was gone. Again. My team betrayed me.”

“Like I did.” Bucky’s voice is still quiet. 

“No,” says Steve. Bucky glances at him, derisive, and Steve’s voice gets stronger. “No. It’s not the same. You didn’t know what you were doing. They did. And they did it for more than a year. The whole time we were working together. All those missions I went on with STRIKE – ” He lets out a breath. “I’ve killed more people for Hydra than you did.”

“Hydra had you for a lot longer,” Bucky says. His voice is almost toneless. 

“I never joined Hydra,” Steve says sharply. “I haven’t gotten very far with the memos, I don’t know what shit Rumlow says in there, but I never – ”

“I didn’t mean that,” Bucky says. “Of course you didn’t join. I didn’t either. But they still had us both.” 

Steve’s mouth makes a soundless O. 

“Didn’t you realize that before?” Bucky sounds – surprised, curious, as if he’s amazed that Steve could be so stupid. 

Steve erupts out of his chair. “If you knew that, why’d you throw Rumlow in my face?” he demands. “He never did ‘swing a romantic involvement.’ Never made it obvious enough that he was aiming for it. Maybe if he’d shoved me against the wall and kissed me like you did at the YMCA – ”

Bucky flinches. Steve is angry, and ashamed, because what Bucky did was sweet and playful and he’s making it sound violent, which is what it would have been, if Rumlow did it. “How do you think I’d feel about it now, if Rumlow and I fucked? Were you hoping to make me cry?” 

Bucky rubs his hands over his knees, a nervous, purposeless motion. “I’m sorry,” he says. 

Steve wants to shake him. At least this afternoon, on the roof – at least Bucky felt _something_ , at least he was fighting, even if he was cruel. “Why say it?” he demands. 

“I don’t know,” Bucky says. 

“Yes, you do! Why did you say it?” 

“I was angry!” Bucky yells. “You were prying and I was angry!” 

Steve sits again. His legs feel weak. Bucky rubs a hand over his mouth, and Steve can see that it is trembling. 

“You were prying,” Bucky says again. “I didn’t want to talk, and instead of leaving it alone you were going behind my back and reading all those books…” He gives a little shrug. “I can pry too.” He looks at Steve, and there’s a glint of malice in his eyes. “You don’t want to talk about your shit either.” 

“No,” Steve admits. 

Bucky holds his eyes for a few more seconds. Then he blinks and looks away and lets out a shaky little sigh. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. He feels shaky and sick and yet strangely relieved, as if he has just vomited. “I’ve been selfish. I wanted to… make you open up, I guess.” It sounds appalling when he says it out loud. “That’s why I made you watch _The Snow Queen_ , and eat pirozhki – 

“I love pirozhki,” Bucky interrupts. It startles Steve into silence. His attention seems to unnerve Bucky, who swallows twice before he continues. “I love movies. I didn’t mind about any of that, Steve. If you had been looking for a kissel recipe in that book – we could’ve made it together. It would’ve been fun. It was just…”

He trails off. Steve waits, and then attempts to supply the end of the sentence. “When I was prying,” he said. “Going behind your back. Snooping into your past. You didn’t like that.” 

Bucky nods. 

“Well,” Steve says wryly. “You’ve shown me how that feels. I didn’t much like it either.”

Bucky’s mouth twists. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I only read your files in the first place because…” His voice is a strange mixture of apologetic and defensive. “I had to know what kind of person SHIELD made you before I could come back.” 

“Did the files tell you that?” 

“No.” Bucky raps his knuckles against his left arm. The metal clangs dully. “I would’ve stayed away if my arm hadn’t broken. Not because…” A glance at Steve. “Not because I didn’t want to see you. Just not enough to risk arrest or…” Bucky shrugs.

“The risk was too great,” Steve says. He gets it. 

Bucky nods. They sit in silence. It’s an easier silence than many of the silences they’ve shared over the last few months – or so Steve thinks, until Bucky raises his head to look at him, and tries to speak, and looks down at his lap, and up at Steve again, and chokes as he tries to speak again. He swallows, and changes tack, and says, “I didn’t really shove you against the wall, did I?” 

It takes Steve a minute to return to the earlier subject. “Oh! No. No. I mean you did,” Steve says, “but I loved it.” And his face goes so hot that he’s certain it’s visible even in the dim light. 

He is expecting Bucky to say – something – but Bucky doesn’t. He rubs his face. He looks very tired. 

Then he looks up at Steve, and Steve is startled to see there are tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you more,” Bucky says. 

Steve is filled with remorse. “No, Buck, you don’t owe me that – ”

“No, but you’re not wrong to want it,” Bucky interrupts. “You wanted your best friend back, and I’ve been keeping you at a distance, after you took me in and fixed my arm and gave me a home, when I left you to die on the riverbank – ”

“Bucky.”

“But it’s just hard, Steve, it’s so hard. I can’t talk about anything important – even when I want to, and you’re going to expect – ” Bucky’s voice is trembling. “ – that I’m going to keep this up, and I can’t, Steve. It’s too hard. I can’t. I can’t talk about anything important without falling apart.” 

“Neither can I,” Steve points out. But Bucky doesn’t seem to hear him. His hands are clasped, his fingers twitching, his mouth dragging down at the corners, so locked in a struggle for self-control that nothing from outside can get through. “Hey,” Steve says, and moves toward Bucky, hands outstretched – and then draws back, uncertain, just at the moment when Bucky twitches as if he means to reach out. 

“Oh, sit down,” Bucky snaps, and smacks the place to his right. Steve sits, and Bucky slings an arm around his shoulder, tentative for a moment, and then he tightens his grip and gives Steve a little shake. It’s so much like old times that Steve starts teary-laughing, and Bucky starts to laugh too, and cry at the same time. 

Steve has to get up to fetch the Kleenex box again. For a while the room is quiet except for the sound of snuffling. They are sitting side by side, not touching. Bucky wads up his Kleenex and tosses it at the trash can. It bounces off the rim. 

Bucky rubs a hand over his face. “Don’t try to make me talk to you,” he says quietly. “About the Soviet Union. Or any of that.” 

Steve bites his lip. He tastes blood. “All right.” 

Bucky glances over at him. His face still has a soft watery look. “I want to be here for you. I just don’t know how.” His voice gets softer as he speaks, till he’s almost swallowing the last words. 

Steve shakes his head. He blows his nose again, to give himself time to think, but his mind remains a blank. “I don’t want to ask too much of you,” he says. 

“We could…” Bucky’s voice dies away again. He rubs the back of his neck and clears his throat. “I could get you a copy of that book. We could try making kissel.” 

“You don’t have to. I don’t think it had a kissel recipe anyway. We could find one on the internet,” Steve says. 

“Or blini,” says Bucky. He is making a heroic effort to keep his voice steady and not quite succeeding. “Blini is easier.”

“Sure,” Steve says. “Let’s make blini.”

Bucky hesitates for a moment. His lips part, and Steve has the impression that he wants to say something else. 

But instead Bucky blurts, “Good night.” And then he’s gone. The door shuts softly behind him.

Steve sits still after Bucky leaves. He is waiting for his feelings to hit him, but nothing does, particularly. Bucky has made one of those abrupt exits Steve hates, and Steve doesn’t mind. He’s glad Bucky came, and glad that they talked, and now he is very tired, and calm. 

Steve relaxes. He lets himself drop backward onto the bed. 

It is not really night anymore. The sky has turned gray with approaching dawn. Steve knows this time of day well: he used to get up every morning in the dark, and walk through the gray pre-dawn to get his morning papers to sell. He hated waking up so early, and yet he liked those early morning walks through the quiet city under the soft clean sky. 

Steve gazes out the window, and for once his thoughts are quiet. He watches the sky lighten and doesn’t think about anything, and falls asleep as the sun rises.


End file.
